the bottom line

A Culture of Extraordinary
Care: Part 4

By Ed Yoder, MBA, MHA, RT(R), FAHRA, CRA

In part three of this series, we discussed
creating expected behaviors. This is essential to building a culture of extraordinary
care, much like a floor plan is for building
a house. You cannot start building it without a plan. The construction team would
not know where to start or know exactly
what to build. The end result would be a
disaster. Talk about discombobulation and
confusion! Imagine the chaos! Why would
creating a cultural behavior be any different? You have to have a plan and a design
for your team to follow. Once you have
that plan, you can begin to identify your
high, middle, and low performers within
those identified behaviors, as well as focus
on recruiting for high level performers.

This is a crucial part of designing an
excellent culture because your high performers will help you carry the initiative
forward and will be essential for helping
the middle performers raise their performance levels. Your low performers are
the “nay-sayers” and malcontents who
will help bring the initiative down. They
are essential to identify because they will
need to be encouraged to get on the cultural train or get off it, thus freeing up
their futures to work elsewhere. If you
have heard of the concept “cultivate your
roses or daisies and pull your weeds,” the
concepts are similar. Your middle performers can be swayed to either side of
the fence, you want them aligned with
the high performers because they will
encourage and pull the best of the performance from the middle performers. This

Your high performers will help you carry the initiativeforward and will be essential for helping the middleperformers raise their performance levels.

is where your low performers become
cancerous, eroding and contaminating
the middle performers. You must stop
this at all costs.

These conversations occur by calling each
team member into your office individually
and discussing each person’s performance
and how it fits into the new culture.

High Performer Conversations

These team members are already on the
bus. They buy into the mission, values,
and goals. They display proactive attitudes
and exhibit the behaviors you desire and
were the ones that created the doctrine on
what is acceptable behavior when you laid
the foundation for this culture change.
They are your drivers and will challenge
all others within the department. These
team members get the job done and are
interested in best practices and obtaining
goals. The have positive attitudes and will
be the mentors when you introduce new
team members.

During conversations with these teammembers you will want to tell them wherethe organization is going, what the newculture will be, what’s in the strategic ini-tiative, and how the department figuresinto that plan. These individuals are mo-tivated by doing the right thing and pro-viding compassionate care—they want towork for an organization that recognizesthis and is moving in the right direction.You need to let them know that is whereyou are headed and you appreciate theirwork and their future contributions. Tellthem they will play a pivotal role in the newculture. High performing team memberslike to know their work is valued and thatthey play an important part in the depart-ment. They like specifics so be detailed inhow you highlight their work.